Smaller Than You Think

Recently, on a flight to Buenos Aires, I was reminded just how small the world really is. Traveling by night, you close your eyes in Chicago, and when you awake, you’re there. Even the time zone remains constant. There are of course a few subtle differences with regard to language, food and culture. However, the similarities far outweigh them.

Effective customer service, for example, may look a bit different from one country to the next, yet the desire to provide good service is universal. Leadership approaches may vary from culture to culture, yet the ability to coach and develop others and raise the bar on talent is ubiquitous, and critical.

In a global economy, a core challenge faced by many organizations is the ability to ensure consistent quality across regions. As companies compete for greater market share by extending their respective brands into less charted waters, maintaining one’s caliber of service becomes ever more challenging. How can you ensure the quality of your offerings remains true throughout the world, and that the reputation you’ve built in the East unwaveringly transcends to the North, South and West? The answer is, by ensuring global consistency in your quality of hire.

The approach to getting there is more familiar than you might think. Identifying the characteristics needed for success in role, applying proven assessments to tap those characteristics, and using those assessment results to identify and train new hires on relevant performance gaps, is a formula for success. Online testing, in particular, presents a proven and efficient means for ensuring consistent quality of hire throughout the globe. Time zones even work to your advantage, empowering you to assess candidates continuously, as daylight hits a new country every hour of the day.

Ensuring the same exceptional quality and consistency of your brand throughout the world is a challenge inherent to the global economy. Yet, by capitalizing on a globally consistent hiring process, you can ensure the same caliber of excellence, whether you’re in The Windy City or the City of Fair Winds.

Brad Schneider, Ph.D., is Senior Vice President of Talent Assessment at PSI. Contact him at bschneider@psionline.com or by phone at 818.847.6180

PSI Blog

PSI Services is saddened to announce the unexpected passing of our colleague and friend, David Meissner. David joined PSI in July 2016 as Vice President, Global Testing Services. While at PSI, David worked closely with the operations team to assess and implement growth strategies for domestic and global test site operations.

In recent years, I have been observing a tension evolving between two important goals in many organizations’ talent assessment endeavors. Understandably, many organizations are interested in the briefest possible assessment processes, particularly for entry-level high volume assessment programs. At the same time, many organizations also desire highly immersive assessment processes, to ensure an up-to-date, engaging experience